Quotes About Contrarian

the academic world, the intellectual world, where always to be antagonizing people and challenging whatever they said was apparently looked on with admiration.

I'm drawn to things that aren't particularly popular at the time. I don't know why.

I buy when other people are selling.

In business, as in politics, it is never easy to go against the beliefs and attitudes held by the majority. The businessman who moves counter to the tide of prevailing opinion must expect to be obstructed, derided and damned.

Kids always like the villain or the guy who's different.

Typically, it begins with a seemingly minor character—Mussolini in a crowded cellar, Hitler on a street corner—who steps forward only as dramatic events unfold. The story advances when the opportunity to act comes and Fascists alone are prepared to strike. That is when small aggressions, if unopposed, grow into larger ones, when what was objectionable is accepted, and when contrarian voices are drowned out.

When told that there was to be the annual jamboree for academic philosophers in Cambridge in 1947, he said it was as if he had been told that there would be bubonic plague in Cambridge, and he would make sure he was in London — which he was!

Three simple rules - pay less, diversify more and be contrarian - will serve almost everyone well.

I'm the git in the family.

Successful contrarian investing requires us to live with discomfort, for being "wrong" and alone. But bargains do not exist in the absence of fear.

Be Fearful When Others Are Greedy and Greedy When Others Are Fearful

If you really want the key to success, start by doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing.

The main reason that we felt positive was because all of the trends were so negative. This was not just to be stubbornly or rigidly contrarian—because being a true contrarian means not to go slavishly against the grain, but to be always independent in your thinking. It was simply that we and the short-term smart money were operating according to different time frames.

Klarman has a wonderful line: "Value investing is at its core the marriage of a contrarian streak and a calculator."35 He's saying that you have to be different from others and focus on gaps between price and value. This idea extends well beyond the world of investing.

It's a classic bias in human thinking: most of us never want to imagine the worst. We are optimists by nature. Personally, I find the zeitgeist at Davos every year to be a contrarian indicator of the future. If everyone in the Davos set believes something will happen—good or bad, as it may be—they are highly likely to be wrong.

I don't want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there.

Going against the grain takes courage, but that courage pays off. You'll do better as an investor if you think for yourself and seek out bargains in parts of the market that everyone else has forsaken, rather than buying the flavor of the month in the financial press.

Irreverence is our only sacred cow.